Shell Scripting question involving ping
 

Hello! As the topic states I'm making a script that will do the following things on boot from a livecd:

• Assign itself an IP address
• Ping the machines on the network and find the missing IP address
• Once the missing IP address is found, the machine with the livecd inside will assume that IP

Currently I have a workaround where the livecd mounts the partition of the machine and searches for specific files within that partition. If it finds a file, then it takes the IP address of the machine that I assigned for it. This method can become annoying as I will then have to create specific files for each computer and add more lines to the script if I ever want to add more computers to the network.

My Question: Is there any other way to find if a computer is online other then grep/parsing through the ping output?

Maybe I'm missing something here, but can't you just use DHCP to assign IP addresses? I mean the MAC address doesn't change, so?

I agree with unSpawn about the DHCP, you can assign specific IP's bound by their MAC Addresses.

As for the finding computers online, nmap is a good tool to see what's online rather than using ping.

Haha, wow. I honestly didn't think of/completely forgot about DHCP. This should make things alot easier for me. Thanks!